July 2011
1 post
4 tags
Which fish?
My friend and partner in crime, DRMaciver, pointed me to David McCandless & Derek Guo’s shocking visualisation of Atlantic fish stocks in the Guardian. I’d been vaguely concerned about our fish-eating habits. I happen to love fish but the murmurs about the state of fishing has been making me increasingly uneasy, fuelled by documentaries like Shark Water and Blue Planet. But I find...
May 2011
1 post
2 tags
TallyHo.it - keep a count of anything you want for...
I’ve been getting very into personal instrumentation recently, tracking energy expenditure via a Fitbit, weight via some Withings scales, mood via Mappiness, movies, gigs and books via my very own @oo5 project. I started noting all this stuff out of curiosity; I didn’t have any concrete plans for the data. There were vague thoughts of some kind of visualisation to help me find...
January 2011
2 posts
8 tags
My predictions for 2011
Web Designer Depot have published my predictions for 2011 alongside a bunch of my favourite designers. Here’s what I had to say, with bonus hyper-linky goodness.
If 2010 was the year that mobile came of age then 2011 will see it move into its own apartment next door to the desktop and start throwing wild parties. Having started as the younger, slightly neglected sibling it’s now on the...
4 tags
This time last year - Flickr reminiscence
This time last year I had just arrived in Belize. I was standing on the beach in Placencia, on the world’s narrowest high street, with my brother and friend Brett. Our ferry had been cancelled and we’d spent the whole day working our way from Honduras up the coast by truck, boat, bus and lancha.
With the New Year just gone I thought it might be nice to reminisce so I build a little...
June 2010
1 post
3 tags
Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power &...
While I was in Central America over New Year I found myself trying to place the Maya, the Olmec and the Aztecs into the timeline of world history. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in context before - everything I’ve read deals with a single empire, civilisation or region. So I decided to draw a graph to find out. The result is Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power...
April 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Elect or not? compared to proper polls
Over the last week or so I’ve started pushing a little thought tool/influence experiment I’ve set up called Elect or not? I’m trying to gently nudge people into thinking about why they vote for who they vote for while hopefully gathering some data on the halo effect while I’m at it. I’ll write more about the science behind it when I get some more time.
Out of...
5 tags
Some Sass tools on Github
On a whim, and after an off-hand suggestion from Stef, I decided to pop some of my most-used Sass mixins - the ones that I include in every new project - up on Github. There’s nothing too ground-breaking here: a straight port of Eric Meyer’s reset.css, and a few CSS3 expanders.
The CSS3 expanders are probably the most interesting. I was getting irritated with having to type and retype...
February 2010
3 posts
1 tag
YouTube feed to Boxee feed converter
To get my 4oD Boxee app working I first had to convert Channel 4’s YouTube feeds into Boxee’s format. I’ve gone with the simplest thing I possibly could - just including the bare essentials - but it serves my purpose so maybe it’ll be of some use to someone else.
In a nutshell: you pass it a YouTube username, it gives you back a Boxee RSS feed. Done.
Here are some examples:
4od
4oDComedy
...
1 tag
4oD on Boxee
These days almost all my TV viewing has moved online. After much frustration I settled on Boxee as my home entertainment center of choice, running on a Mac Mini sitting on my shelf. It started quite rough but it’s been constantly improving and the new version is great. My favourite thing about Boxee is the iPlayer though. It puts almost all of my favourite TV content on Boxee. Almost all.
What’s...
4 tags
Soft launch for You Might Not Know
You Might Not Know is a place to share those little tips you’ve picked along this road called Life. These tips can be able absolutely anything. If you think they’re useful then someone else will too. Or that’s what we think, anyway.
David and myself have been busy working on the prototype for a while now and after much procrastinating we’ve finally decided it’s safe to tell people about it.
I’m...
January 2010
1 post
4 tags
Me at TEDx
Towards the end of last year I had the privilege to be invited to speak at the rather marvellous TEDx event put on by CodeWorks up in Newcastle. Each of the talks was filmed to the exacting TED standard and the result is a very slick-looking video of me rambling on about some of my favourite things.
October 2009
2 posts
2 tags
Dr. Frankenstory gets his own Lab
From the beginning of Frankenstory we wanted a way to showcase stories. Our first attempt was very predictable: a list of stories that we could add our favourites to. But something about it just didn’t feel right… Frankenstory is supposed to be fun, first and foremost; it’s not a competition. Or at least not in the usual sense.
Enter Nick, who had the rather marvellous idea of writing a blog...
1 tag
Stories and Experience at TEDx Newcastle
On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at TEDx Newcastle, kindly organised by the good folk at Codeworks. My talk was about the memory of experiences.
Unless we make underwear or the like, our products probably spend most of their existence in the memory of our customers. In Stories and Experience I run through what we can do to help ensure that the experiences we design become...
September 2009
1 post
7 tags
QIF Converter
I’ve been using Wesabe for a few months now and I love it. I’m finding accumulating financial data quite addictive. Unfortunately, of the banks I use only my current account has any kind of export. I wrote a little script to parse my downloaded statement HTML into QIF files and over the weekend I decided to polish it a little and slap it on Heroku.
The result is my QIF Converter. It’s dead...
June 2009
1 post
1 tag
Learning Ruby
A friend of mine wants to learn to program. I recommended either Ruby or Python and petitioned the Lazyweb for good places to start. In case they’re of use to anyone else, here are the recommendations I got back:
Poignant Guide
Way out in front is the Poignant Guide. It’s by why. It starts with a cartoon strip. Awesome.
Tryruby
An in-browser console. Allows you to dip your toes in the water...
May 2009
2 posts
Brand Equity
Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google, Asks Consumers to Rethink Search
Many will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference – the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad...
3 tags
Me pages
Have you ever taken a look at the Google Social Graph API? In their words it:
returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them.
Eeerrrr, okaaaay. What it means is that Google can connect the various profiles you have created for yourself around the web - on Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, and dozens of other sites.
They do this by looking at the links on these...
April 2009
4 posts
1 tag
The Barcamp PaperWiki experiment
While in Iceland back in November Brian Suda and I (when not discussing ideas for sausage innuendo) had an idea for a kind of physical wiki. I had met a guy at Etech a few years ago who was experimenting with placing blank pieces of paper and pens in public spaces and seeing what conversation might develop; Brian was trying to work out how to make real-world travel guides more social. One of the...
1 tag
Little Known Readability Research
I just read Smashing Magazine’s 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography in Your Designs, which heavily references the Robert Bringhurst’s classic The Elements of Typographic Style. The advice is all good but there’s more recent supporting evidence to draw upon than this 1992 tome. Here are two good papers that I’ve been quoting:
Optimal Line Length
Users tend to read faster if the line lengths are...
2 tags
Frankenstory
As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on? Well, I did but I’d completely forgotten about it. Fortunately my friend Tone hadn’t…
The game’s called Exquisite Corpse or Consequences - depending on where you come from - and is ludicrously good fun. Tone grabbed his mate Suzie and with him acting as middle-man Suzie and I...
7 tags
Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map
A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any...
November 2008
1 post
Persuasive Design at Iceweb 08 in Reykjavik,...
View SlideShare presentation or upload your own. (tags: user experience marketing design psychology iceweb08)
October 2008
2 posts
Tapping the Main Line Bibliography
Books
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Sources of Power by Gary Klein
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster
Mind Hacks by Stafford and Webb
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
Yes! by Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini
Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
Articles
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
...
Tapping the Main Line at SHiFT 08 in Lisbon,...
View SlideShare presentation or upload your own. (tags: user experience marketing design psychology shift08)
January 2008
1 post
1 tag
Community, Trust and Music
Trent Reznor was disheartened by fans not paying for the Saul Williams album but I think he proved that independent music can viably be given away. Selling 30,000 copies of a niche album in its first couple of month in the wild with zero promotion is pretty damned good in my book. I believe that they succeeded in making money despite a flawed execution. So here’s a manifesto, of sorts. A mix of...
September 2007
1 post
5 tags
@media Ajax 2007
I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It’s a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs. In a lineup like that I clearly can’t talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I’m taking a slightly...
April 2007
1 post
7 tags
Etech is over
Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn’t about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions…...
March 2007
3 posts
6 tags
Speaking at eTech
On Sunday I’m packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I’ve always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I’m incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control… It’s a bit of a...
9 tags
Leaving freelancing
After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field...
5 tags
MySpace vs Facebook
I’ve been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I’ve barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It’s just too much hassle. It’s hard to wade through the hundreds of peoples’ friends looking for bands I want to check out. It’s a hassle trawling through all the spam comments and ads for...
February 2007
2 posts
The gold rush
The last couple of days at The Future of Web Apps has confirmed something I was talking to one of my friends about a few months ago… We have a gold rush on right now. There are a mass of little startups right now. Why? Because the web is booming. Behaviour is changing and acceptance is growing. It’s becoming ubiquitous. That’s hardly news. What’s interesting is the position...
7 tags
Music, London and MySpace
The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can’t remember a time when there were more gigs to go to… In the last 10 days I’ve seen: Crystal Castles
Danny Rapscallion of The Rapscallions
Cardboard Radio
Rosemary
A jam session at the Macbeth
Miss Odd Kid
Middleman
Sportsday Megaphone
Metronomy
Scout Niblett
Bonnie Prince Billy
One interesting thing I...
January 2007
1 post
Background-position in CSS Explained
After an incredibly frustrating few hours trying to figure out why my liquid faux columns weren’t working I had a minor epiphany. I finally understand how background images positioned with percentages work! Not something that many people would get excited about, to be fair, but after an entire afternoon of twiddling numbers, resaving gifs and quietly cursing anyone who dared interrupt me, I was...
December 2006
2 posts
9 tags
Building Modern Webapps at The Spring Experience
I’ve just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren’t on the slides. For anyone who’s interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I...
Building Modern Webapps at The Spring Experience
I’ve just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren’t on the slides. For anyone who’s interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I...
October 2006
3 posts
6 tags
The Enron Explorer
This honestly wasn’t planned but you know Jeff Skilling was just sentenced to 24 years this morning for his part in the Enron collapse? Well it just so happens that while developing the SONAR application at Trampoline we decided to use the Enron email archive, which was made public as part of the FARC investigations, as our test data set. The results were so much fun that we’ve turned...
4 tags
Internet Explorer 7 Graces us with her Presence
So IE7 has finally been released and the inevitable security exploits have already started surfacing. I’m very glad to see it, to be honest. The new CSS support is very welcome, even if it is playing catchup to the rest of the field. And I’ve got it running standalone too. Jon Galloway’s IE7 Standalone works just fine with a single change to the ‘IE7 Standalone...
13 tags
Why I won't music shop on the high street - a...
The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night… I’d wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often...
September 2006
1 post
APIs
Along with the whole Web 2.0 thing has come a lot of talk about APIs. At the Carson Summit back in February Tom Coates said that the internet was becomming a web of data linked by APIs, which is a facinating view. For consumer sites releasing an API appears to be a bit of a no-brainer because it opens you up to allow 3rd parties to add value and stickiness to your business at little extra cost....
August 2006
3 posts
6 tags
The BBC popularising Podcasting
I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off… And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown...
7 tags
Think Blogging
I know I’ve not been posting here too regularly but I’ve not been completely out of the blogging loop… I’m using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I’ve been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun....
5 tags
The Spring Experience
Who’s this bloke then? Yep, I recognise him too… So, I’m off to Miami in December to speak at The Spring Experience! I’m excited and a little nervous. The sessions are super-long, weighing in at 90 minutes, but quite small so a workshop-type-thing might be possible, but I’ll have to wait and see. Keeping peoples’ attention for that long is a very daunting...
July 2006
1 post
4 tags
The Rojo Newsletter
I’ve been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its recommendation engine - I can click on ‘My feeds’ and be shown entries ordered by my likely interest in them, which suits me much better than strict chronology thanks to the time pressure...
June 2006
1 post
Article Comments
I just read Mark’s article over on Vitamin (which I really enjoyed by the way) and I was going to comment but I thought I’d better read what everyone else had said first. By the time I got to the end of the comments I’d just about lost the will to live and had no inclination to contribute anything.
It seemed like almost everyone missed Mark’s point. What kind of comment is this:
WHO...
May 2006
4 posts
4 tags
Podcasting vs Singles for small labels
I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking… It’s a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren’t they reducing their artists’ saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What’s in it for them? I...
3 tags
London Web Community
On my busride home from the London Javascript Night I had time to think. The organised speakers were interesting but the beers afterwards were even better. It was an opportunity to get a little drunk and throw ideas around with the likes of Patrick Griffiths, Dan Webb, Dave Stone, Paul Hammond, Drew McLellan, Norm and our very own Javascript guru Dean Edwards. Name dropping at all? Well, yes...
3 tags
Blogging for credibility
I’ve just been reading about Squidoo and its aim to provide a place for people to mark out their ground as experts and make money from what they write about. Mike Rundle and Michael Arrington were both quick to point out that just starting a blog would accomplish this and Wikipedia provides space for the rest. Why is this interesting? Well, it’s interesting because it demonstrates the...
3 tags
Pimping my brother
My brother, Ewen, is taking part in his first exhibition, up now at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes in Shoreditch, London. The show features the likes of Jon Burgerman, Paris Hair, Kabe 243, Mr Pinks and Ron Jonzo… But there’s a catch. They’re not allowed to use pens or paint; it’s strictly cut and paste. And hence it’s called Paper Cuts. My brother’s is the massive...
April 2006
7 posts
Why do keywords matter?
what people are ACTUALLY thinking. Insight into psycology, society, vocabulary what are keywords? Need to start at the very, very beginning. Let me put this in another context. You are selling your house. Imaging knowing what words people use when they are searching for a house to buy… If you knew that you could get more people interested. more interest means more potential offers, a quicker...
7 tags
Recognition Primed Decision-making and Web...
After seeing Sources of Power referenced by two of my favourite books, Don’t Make Me Think and Blink, and having it recommended to me by a chap at work I finally got around to reading it. In the book Gary Klein studies the decision making process exhibited by people under time pressure: firemen, tank commanders, chess players and the like. Conventional wisdom tells us that people weigh their...